The shadow attorney general, Michaelia Cash, has accused Labor of “weaponising” Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation, insisting finance minister Katy Gallagher still has questions to answer about her knowledge of the claim before it was aired publicly.
Cash’s comments on Sunday came after Gallagher sought to explain her claim that she did not mislead parliament about the allegation. The continued attack on Gallagher is likely to dominate Coalition questioning in parliament when it resumes this week.
The aged care minister, Anika Wells, hit back for the government, accusing “fairly craven political operators” of demanding answers when they had “never concerned themselves with answering public interest questions” about the treatment of Higgins.
Higgins alleged that she was raped in Linda Reynolds’ parliament house office on the night of 22 March 2019 by fellow Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann. Lehrmann has repeatedly denied the allegation and is suing various media outlets for defamation.
A criminal trial was aborted after juror misconduct and plans for a retrial abandoned over concerns about Higgins’ mental health.
Gallagher has come under fire for telling Senate Estimates in June 2021 that “no one had any knowledge” before stories about the allegation came out on 15 February 2021, despite text messages to Higgins from her partner, David Sharaz, suggested Gallagher was aware four days before.
At the Labor women’s conference in Perth on Saturday, Gallagher said she was “aware of some allegations in the days leading up to the choice of Ms Brittany Higgins to make those allegations public” but “did not mislead the parliament”.
“I was responding to an assertion that was being made by minister Reynolds at the time that we had known about this for weeks and had made a decision to weaponise it,” she said. “That is not true, it was never true.”
On Sunday Cash dismissed this as “a very flimsy explanation which just does not sit with the indignation that she showed during that exchange” during Estimates on 4 June 2021.
Cash said there were “very, very serious questions to answer and based on the evidence that is now coming out, it does appear that there was a potential misleading” of the Senate.
“This is what happens when you weaponise a rape allegation, there are consequences for that,” Cash told Sky News.
“This matter always should have been left to the criminal justice system to deal with and yet what you have now … is that there appears to have been collusion with senior members of the Labor party with the media.”
Gallagher, the Labor Senate leader, Penny Wong, and others have denied weaponising the complaint or colluding with Sharaz and Higgins.
On 4 June 2021 Reynolds told Estimates that she had “a very respectful discussion during the dinner break” with Wong and Gallagher “and they’ve assured me they were not involved in that matter becoming public”.
On Sunday Wells told ABC’s Insiders that “on the night of Senate Estimates where this all blew up that she wasn’t answering questions as a minister, [Gallagher] was the person asking the questions in the first place”.
Wells noted that “Linda Reynolds accepted” Gallagher and Wong’s explanation at the time “and two years on, I accept that now”.
Asked if Gallagher’s statement “no one had any knowledge” was accurate, Wells said “she was aware of some things and she didn’t act on it, she didn’t do anything with that information”.
Wells said she found it “pretty horrifying” it had become a political issue, adding that no one in parliament had “done more for women and the safety of women either inside or outside the building of parliament than Katy Gallagher”.
“These people who are at this point fairly craven political operators running around having never concerned themselves with answering public interest questions one through 86 about what happened … in their government to now say, braying with urgency that we need to answer public interest questions 87 to 88, [is] totally beyond the pale.”
Labor has pointed to the Coalition’s refusal to release the Gaetjens report, into what people in Scott Morrison’s office may have known about the complaint.
And on Saturday, Morrison found himself defending claims from his former director of operations, Fiona Brown, that he misled parliament about whether he had spoken to her about Higgins’ claim that her job had been threatened.
Brown told The Australian that Morrison incorrectly replied in question time that he had spoken with her then approached her afterward and said “we’ve spoken, haven’t we”.
In response, Morrison told The Australian: “I understood my statement to be accurate to the House. I regularly saw Ms Brown in the office and would ask how she was going. Specifics of matters relating to the incident were the subject of many other processes that I did not seek to interfere with.”
